See Through Me
by altschmerz
Summary: After what happened when he was kidnapped by Murdoc, to say that Mac is not a fan of needles would be putting it lightly. However, unfortunately for him, flu season doesn't care. Fortunately, Jack isn't about to let him go to the vaccination clinic alone, and the doctors at the clinic are understanding, if mistaken about the circumstances. (gen, post 2x04 X-Ray Penny)


for my found family bingo square 'medical appointments', as prompted by waitingforthestarstofall on tumblr! thanks for the suggestion of doing this one with mac and jack!

as a warning, this fic does revolve around like. a fear of needles. which ironically results in a pretty constant and serious discussion of needles and vaccinations and the like. which is funny because guess who is also scared of needles, to the point i have to look away when they're on screen?

anyways. cw for needles and such, though i'll try to be as sparing as possible with actual descriptions of them.

* * *

It feels like places like Los Angeles should be immune to flu season. It lacks the dreary weather that shrouds much of the country this time of year, justifying the arrival of flu season with at least the correct thematic setting for such a thing. It may be solidly in the mid to high seventies outside, and the sun may be shining, but the yearly CDC warnings and vaccine clinics have arrived upon Los Angeles just as surely as they've come to Seattle and Detroit. Mac has been watching the ads begin to pop up around him in the past two weeks or so with increasing unease. He'd quite forgotten about what happens this time of year until it was upon them, and now that it's here, he can't avoid what it means. There's nothing else for it - he's going to have to get a flu shot.

Even just the thought of it sends Mac's hand twitching over his elbow where a small scar still sits, a knot of healed over skin where not all that long ago, Murdoc had dug a drugged IV in and pressed, hard. It had been one of the most disconcertingly horrific feelings Mac has ever experienced, the needle and the drugs it carried into his body, though it was far from the most sheerly painful. It's not pleasant to reflect on, though he can't avoid it sometimes, his skin crawling with phantom pricks, the sight of sharp things sending his breath tight in his chest half the time, needle or no.

Of course, the easy answer would be to not get the vaccine at all, and hope for the best. Herd immunity existed for a reason, and he can hear Jack's voice in his head, telling him that PTSD was a valid medical condition that could prohibit a person from being vaccinated. This may well be true, but Mac balks at the idea of applying the term to himself. He can hear Jack arguing with him about that as well, pointing out that of course he'd have post traumatic stress disorder after having been kidnapped and tortured by a man who's repeatedly hurt and attempted to kill him and basically his entire family for months. And while this may well be true, Mac can't help but feel it's an overreaction to call it that, stubbornly setting his jaw and telling himself and everyone else that it's temporary, that the dreams and the ghost needles in his arm and the shying away from anything with an edge will pass.

Besides, it's not like he can afford to risk something like the flu, not with the kind of job he has. If Mac was struck with a particularly serious strain, as it was sounding like this year's frontrunner was going to be, he could be out of commission for weeks, and he can't stand the thought of being flat on his back in bed, drinking Gatorade and eating Saltines, while someone else took his risks, did his job, fought his battles. Narcissism or a tendency towards self-sacrifice, either way, he's not willing to accept that. So, flu season has set upon California just as it has upon the rest of the country, and Mac will get his flu shot, just like everyone else.

It's going to be fine. He's already overreacting, and it hasn't even happened yet. It's going to be _fine._

The biggest fear he has going in isn't about the vaccination itself, not about the needle or the pain or anything like that. It's what the medical staff at the Phoenix are going to see when it happens, what kind of panicking breakdown they have the potential to witness. It's not like he expects to have a full on anxiety attack, but it's possible, and if his chest is feeling this tight and the inside of his mouth this dry just thinking about it, he can't discount the possibility. He doesn't want anyone from work to see him like that. It's bad enough that Mac might lose it over something most children handle with composure, but to think that someone in Phoenix medical might _see_ it is… It doesn't merit thinking about.

It's Jack who comes up to the solution, when Mac is sitting in the car with him on the way home one day, haltingly and quietly expressing the latest in his lifelong collection of fears he finds humiliating and difficult to try and explain.

"Just go to, like, the USC Medical Center or something."

Mac is thrown for a loop by the suggestion, his thoughts stopping dead in his tracks, and asking, "Excuse me?"

"Get your shot at the USC Medical Center," Jack repeats, casually, as if this is the most logical and easily arrived upon conclusion ever. "Nobody who works there knows you or will probably ever see you again. They'll probably assume you're some college student from the campus and not think twice about it." As they pull to the curb outside of Mac's house, Jack fishes around in the center console for his phone, hitting a few keys then holding it up. "Look at that, they're doing a clinic on Saturday. I'll pick you up, we'll go early, be in and out before you know it, 'kay?"

It doesn't escape Mac's notice, the 'we'.

"You don't…" He trails off, picking at the seam of his pant leg with a thumbnail, not looking Jack in the eye. "You don't have to come with me, I'll be fine." There's genuinely nothing Mac wants more than for Jack to go with him, but he can't ask that. He can't make Jack give up a good portion of his Saturday to babysit his grown-ass partner at the doctor's office.

By this point, Mac probably should've known better than to try that.

"Hey. Listen to me." Jack's voice has lost its casual edge, gone somehow both gentler and more serious, and the command causes Mac to look up, hand stilling at his side. "I'll pick you up. Okay?"

There's no point in arguing with him, not when both Mac and Jack know he doesn't actually want to go alone. It's a reminder that Jack had seen him that day, had come when the paramedics called and asked him to. They hadn't been able to get within ten feet of Mac, who was barely conscious and fully disoriented, and it had taken Jack, first on the phone and then in person, to calm him down enough to allow himself to be treated. During the course of that, Jack had definitely caught a glimpse of the wound Murdoc and his IV had left in Mac's arm. He likely knows exactly what it means that Mac has barely worn a short sleeved shirt in weeks, refusing to look at the healing scar whenever he can avoid it.

Jack had seen him in the state he'd been when he was found, and Jack sees him now, the state he's in over something as dumb and meaningless as getting a flu shot. The tense in his jaw, very slight tremor in his hands whenever he thinks too hard about anyone coming anywhere near him with a needle... Mac can try and hide it, he can try and control it, but there's no point. Not here, in this car, with just the two of them, because by this point, Jack sees everything. It's terrifying sometimes, how impossible it is to hide things from him.

"Okay," Mac agrees. He looks away and out the window, left hand going automatically to cover the inside of his elbow, muffling the echoing ache there. Murdoc's voice echoes in his ears, _Oh, good, you can still feel pain._ Shaking himself in an attempt to rid himself of the ghosts of his kidnapping, reminding himself it's been long enough, and it's not like there was any lasting damage to begin with, Mac opens the car and gets out. He calls a goodbye over his shoulder, and the car pulls away.

Some twenty minutes later, after Jack must have gotten home, Mac's phone chimes. He picks it up to see a text alert, a website URL sent to him by Jack. It's the page for the USC Medical Center's flu prevention clinic, the address and hours displayed in brightly colored cheerful font. Rolling his eyes, he puts his phone back in his pocket without answering, and tries not to think about Murdoc, or flu shots, or needles of any kind.

Saturday morning is, as Saturday mornings tend to be in their neck of the woods, bright and sunny. Mac sits unnervingly quiet and still in the passenger's seat of Jack's car, looking out the window at the city passing them by. He's barely said a word since Jack picked him up from the sidewalk outside his house, and it's not doing anything to put Jack's mind at ease. If he thought the conversation would go anywhere productive, he'd suggest that Mac just skip this year entirely. It wasn't that he discounted the importance of flu shots - he'd gotten his own the week before, as a matter of plain old civic duty as much as anything else - but there are exceptions to all rules, and he can feel the tension and anxiety radiating off Mac in waves.

The campus of the USC Medical Center is sprawling and busy. Handfuls of the vast scores of hospital personnel employed by the medical behemoth meander around wearing headphones or holding clipboards or talking on the phone, going to or from this appointment or that meeting. It has an anonymizing effect on a person, and reaffirms to Jack that he'd made the right call in suggesting they come here. He pulls up to the patient drop off entrance, maybe a block away from the red sign marked emergency room, and lets Mac out of the car, then heads across the street to park in the garage. It's a brisk five minute walk from where he's eventually parked to the clinic waiting room, where he finds Mac, in a chair away from the other patients waiting to be seen.

Jack pauses for a moment in the doorway to the waiting room, studying him. He's slumped, spine curved in a way betraying his usual if not perfect then at least decent posture, and one of his legs is bouncing up and down rapidly, nervousness bleeding out of him in a physical expression of what Jack had sensed in the car. There's a plastic bracelet around his wrist, with a barcode and some text that's unreadable from this distance - a recent innovation in a lot of hospitals to get a patient's information on a scan rather than having to look them up and risk making an input error each time you need to know who's allergic to penicillin. Sighing and trying to tamp down the pulse of sympathetic ache in his chest, Jack walks over and drops down next to him. He tries to smile like everything is normal, and makes small talk about the parking garage, the narrow stalls and colorful pictures of wildlife marking the floors apart from one another, until a doctor stops in the doorway and calls out, "Angus MacGyver?"

It takes a moment, once he's registered his name being called, for Mac to stand up, and when he does, Jack doesn't miss the moment he spends unsteady on his feet, wavering just the slightest bit. Jack stands too, and the doctor glances over at him. She looks back to Mac and asks, "Will he be joining us?"

It's the first thing that makes Jack like her, addressing the question of Jack's accompaniment to Mac, the actual patient, directly. He only hopes it doesn't prompt the kid to talk himself out of allowing himself to be accompanied. Mac looks over his shoulder at Jack, a troubled question in his face, and Jack nods almost imperceptibly. He turns back and nods himself, quick and embarrassed, eyes skating over the doctor's face and landing somewhere on the beige wall next to her shoulder.

"Yeah," he mutters, and to her credit, the doctor barely reacts. She motions for them both to follow her, and Jack falls into step next to Mac, jostling their shoulders together as they move through the hallway. It's a silent message.

_It's gonna be okay. I'm not goin' anywhere._

When they reach the unassumingly marked Patient Room 14, there's a small crowd of four waiting for them outside, causing Jack to frown. They're led by an older man with a harried look on his face, and the sight of them causes the doctor who's been leading them, a 'Dr. Cheyenne Ames' according to the embroidered lapel of her jacket, to raise her eyebrows.

"Sorry, I guess they got the rotation mixed up, you've got Evan's interns today," the rushed male doctor says, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the three much younger looking white labcoat-clad people standing behind him. "They're supposed to observe the flu clinic."

"You're kidding," Dr. Ames says, before regaining her composure and turning to Mac and Jack. "I apologize. This is a teaching hospital, I'm sure you know, and one of my colleagues is out on maternity leave. Her interns have been on rotation since then, and they appear to be assigned to me today, though this should've been communicated sooner." This last comment is accompanied by a dagger-sharp stare over her shoulder at the man who'd brought her the interns, who cringes. "At any rate, if you're comfortable with it, they'll accompany to observe the procedure. It's a short one, we'll be in and out before you know it," she says, unconsciously echoing Jack's words from the car a few days ago, "but if you're not comfortable with it, I can absolutely find something for them to do until I'm finished up here."

Jack knocks his shoulder into Mac's again, in a silent urge to take her up on it and have her send the interns on whatever wild goose chase they can occupy themselves with until his kid is done being re-traumatized, thanks very much, but that isn't exactly how things shake out. Much to his chagrin, though he can't exactly say he's surprised, Mac elbows him back, and turns to Dr. Ames, forcing a smile onto his slightly-too-pale face.

"That's just fine, they can come," he says. Nobody who hadn't known him as long or as well as Jack did would've noticed the strain in his voice. "It's just a shot, right?'

The room itself looks just like every doctor's office room Jack has ever been in, of the run of the mill, 'nobody's bleeding out and everyone's bones are exactly where they're supposed to be' variety. Mac is directed to the exam table in the center of the room, which he sits on sideways, looking more unnerved by the moment. It's certainly not assisted by the fact that the table is set just high enough that his feet barely brush the floor. Jack takes the liberty of pulling the extra chair in the corner of the room within arm's reach, just in case, expression daring any of the interns who've crowded in behind Dr. Ames to say something about it. Unless Dr. Ames herself tells him to move, they can work around him.

"If I can get you to take your flannel off, please," Dr. Ames says, after scanning his little wristband barcode and tapping a few keys on the computer to the side of the room. =

Mac does as he's told, but shrugs out of the left side of his flannel only, leaving the arm that had been damaged by Murdoc's cruelty shielded, and the scar from Mac's last encounter with a needle of any kind hidden under unassuming blue fabric. It doesn't really, thanks to what Murdoc had done to it, look much like a needle wound of any kind, like a track mark, for example, so it would be unlikely to prompt awkward questions about drug use, but Jack understands why he keeps it hidden nevertheless.

One of the interns, the redheaded boy standing between the two dark haired girls, must notice the look on Mac's face and bypass his common sense filter, because he says in a perfect California drawl, "Not a fan of needles, huh?"

Jack is about to get up out of the chair and escort the fool outside himself, every nerve set on a protective edge and already convinced that half of what's happening is a terrible mistake _at minimum,_ when the unexpected results, and Mac actually laughs. It's a short, breathy sound that's more of a loud exhale than anything else, but it takes just the slightest edge off him, and at that, Jack decides that Intern Fool is, for the moment at least, allowed. He's on thin ice, though, and he'd better watch his step.

"Me either," Intern Fool goes on, causing a slight approving look to take over Dr. Ames' face from where she's standing by the counter, preparing the vaccine itself. "You'd think I'd be used it by now, given all of the medical school, but here we are. _Hate_ 'em."

The small conversation is distracting Mac enough that he doesn't look like he's having a panic attack or about to be having one, and Jack warms to him incrementally more. Perhaps, he thinks, the doctor kids are alright after all.

Inevitably, the moment of truth arrives, and Dr. Ames approaches the bed where Mac sits with the vaccine held in her hand. She talks him through what they're going to do with more slow gentleness than Jack would've predicted a busy doctor would take with an adult getting a flu shot, and it's doing at least something to help calm the quickening breaths he can see jerking Mac's chest. Seeing the way Mac's right hand, the one not extended and relaxed to facilitate the vaccination, clenches into a tight, blanched-knuckle fist, Jack makes a split second decision, and once again silently dares anyone else in the room to comment.

He holds out his own hand, palm up, and stares at Mac expectantly. It takes Mac a long moment to respond, clearly biting the inside of his cheek and hesitating, breaths speeding up and growing shallower. Dr. Ames pauses completely, not making another move towards him, and allowing him time to gather himself. Finally, after Jack gives him a small, encouraging nod, his hand shoots out and grabs onto Jack's. His fingers grip on so tightly Jack would almost be concerned about fracturing something, if he didn't have bigger and more important things to worry about. He can feel Mac shaking now, through their point of connection, and he squeezes back.

"You can go ahead," Mac says, voice barely more than a whisper, eyes squeezing tight shut. Dr. Ames takes him at his word and, after giving him one more moment to change his mind, injects the shot in a few quick and efficient moves.

It's over fast, but Mac may as well have been full-on stabbed, for the way his body reacts to it. His breathing freezes entirely, eyes still closed, and his short nails dig into the back of Jack's hand. Obediently, the arm the shot had gone into remains lax and loose at his side, but absolutely no other part of him does. He's so tensed up it's going to hurt later, Jack knows it will, and the helpless sadness that rips through him is so strong it takes his own breath away too. This isn't fair. If Murdoc were in front of him now, Jack couldn't say what he'd do. Even the thought makes his vision nearly white out with anger.

"All done," Dr. Ames says, her voice light and casual, graciously not pointing out exactly how hard of a time Mac has had with the vaccine. She smoothes a band-aid over the small prick of blood visible on his upper arm and rolls down his t-shirt sleeve, then steps back. "I'll give you a moment, just speak to my colleagues here for a minute, and then I'll be back with your paperwork and we can all be on our way. Alright?"

Still without opening his eyes or letting go of Jack's hand, Mac nods once, short and sharp.

The door closes quietly behind Dr. Ames and the interns, and the instant they're alone, it's like whatever was holding Mac up disintegrates. He crumples forward on himself, wriggling his arm back into the flannel and pulling it defensively across his chest. He does not release his grip on Jack, and Jack doesn't move to pull away either. As long as Mac needs him to stay here, wild horses couldn't drag him away. However, he does stand up, putting himself discreetly between Mac and the patient room door. His free hand comes up to cup the back of Mac's curved neck, fingers lightly brushing the ends of his blond hair. Not a word passes between them, silence broken only by the ticking of the clock on the wall.

Eventually, Mac clears his throat and straightens up, letting go of Jack's hand. His slightly too bright eyes roam over the room and he shifts uncomfortably, and Jack can tell he wants a moment to himself to collect his composure. Though the last thing he wants to do is leave the room, leave Mac alone to deal with the ramifications of what could've very well been a flashback on his own, he knows that Mac needs a little space, and what Mac needs trumps what he wants. Shoving his hands into his pockets, Jack turns towards the door.

"I'll grab you a glass of water or something, hey? There's gotta be a vending machine outside. Sit tight, I'll be right back."

Mac doesn't respond except for a small, grateful smile, and Jack forces himself to leave the room before he can change his mind and stay.

Once out of the room, something stops him from continuing on his journey to locate a bottle of water from a vending machine. He hears the voice of Dr. Ames, from around the corner, out of eyesight, speaking most likely to the interns.

"...really important not to give any indication of judgement for what patients need to make them feel comfortable and safe during procedures of any kind. Dr. Rose," she's saying, addressing, presumably, Intern Fool, "you did a great job with that, identifying, empathizing with, and validating the patient's fear. We get cases like this all the time because of our proximity to campuses, nervous college kids who want a parent with them, but will give it up at the slightest indication we think they're overreacting, or think they're not behaving like adults. What is important is that they feel safe and comfortable, and if they're worried about their image, that's not what's going to happen. Understand?"

Well. Jack had been right about one thing, he thinks, while a chorus of 'yes doctor' peppers around the question. They had, in fact, assumed Mac was a student at a nearby college. As for himself, well. He's had far worse assumptions leveled at him in his day.

Before he can quite realize it's about to happen, Dr. Ames has rounded the corner, reapproaching Mac's room, and stopped dead in her tracks. It's evident from his position and the fact that he's clearly been eavesdropping that he had overheard what she was saying, and she looks acutely surprised and embarrassed of this fact.

"Mr. MacGyver," she says, and Jack makes absolutely no move to correct her. "I apologize sincerely, you were not intended to overhear any of that. I am not usually one to discuss patients in hallways, and that coaching should have taken place somewhere with a door that could be closed."

Jack shrugs and waves it off. Truly, she hadn't really violated any kind of confidentiality as far as Jack could tell - there had been no identifying information and she'd never used Mac's name - but he appreciates the apology nevertheless. It helps that he agreed with and was impressed by the attitude of everything she'd said. If she was the one training the next generation of doctors, he figures a lot of traumatized patients would be receiving a lot more competent and sensitive care than he and Mac have encountered in the past.

"Ah, don't worry about it," he says, instead jerking his thumb over his shoulder. "Do you think I could get a cup of water or something? He's still a little nervy, y'know?"

All things considered, things could have gone much worse, and as Jack re-enters Mac's room with a little paper cup of water, he feels pretty okay about all of it. Even Intern Fool- _Dr. Rose_ had earned a gold star in his book.

They're sitting in the car on the way home, Mac bunched up in his seat like he's trying to make the smallest target of himself possible, arms folded tightly over his chest, when he speaks for the first time since leaving the hospital.

"Thank you," he says quietly, voice a little hoarse. "You didn't have to… Thank you."

Jack doesn't take his eyes off the road, ignoring another quiet, faint echo of pain in his chest, saying easily and without hesitation, "Nowhere I'd rather be."


End file.
